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repeated.
    But Stefan had already started to row on the spot.
    Jonathan stopped at the lights and watched the tram drive away. The electronic sign
Louiza
changed from French to Dutch and back again. There was something charming in the name, the giddiness of a woman who could be a queen from Europe or a teenager from New Orleans, hide her cheek with a fan or conceal the large teeth of a smile with her hand.
    An affair on the side for a tepid marriage, erection lifting.
    Another tram pulled up, flashing the sign
Montgomery
.
    There was, however, the matter of honor, a basic principle he’d carried away with him from books he’d read as a boy: do not take a woman away from another man.
    He pulled the cell from his pocket – Andrea hadn’t written anything that day. Very good; he, too, wouldn’t write. After all, nothing had happened between them; he hadn’t even suggested they meet. It was only a game, neither foreplay nor anything criminal.
    His eyes followed a bus with a NATO sign that changed into OTAN, short for
Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord
.
    Perhaps it would all somehow peter out of its own accord. Please!

7
    J ONATHAN RINSED HIS RAZOR , splashed his face with water and patted the rest of the Victor & Rolf scent into his skin. Megi clattered some cutlery downstairs, no doubt cleaning it; they had taken it out of the boxes just that day. She’d also found the dinner set they got as a wedding present from her family: plates covered in a floral design, more suited to a grandmother’s household than a young family’s.
    He brushed his hair and put the brush back on the shelf below the mirror. Sometimes he caught himself doing little things that reminded him of his father, an unpleasant feeling that he counteracted with a shrug of the shoulders. But the fear remained – like that in dreams about going back to school.
    He opened the bathroom window and took a deep breath as he looked out at the Brussels street. He had more hair than his father had even in photographs when he was young. The latter had grown bald quickly and Jonathan hoped this was not a question of genes but of getting up for years at daybreak in order to go off to the same socialist institution. It must have been difficult for him to bring up an only child alone.
    Jonathan pulled on his jeans and fastened his shirt. Megi bustled around downstairs preparing the Saturday party. She’d invited her new colleagues from work and it was important for her that all went well. Jonathan had promised to fry salmon in dill sauce, his culinary masterpiece.
    When he went down, Megi looked at him from over a pile of plates. In a pair of tight jeans which highlighted her bottom and with her hair, straight from the stylist, cut in a bob in order to show off her neck, she looked like a girl.
    “Jonathan?” she hesitated. “Would you please not ask anyone your usual question, “But what is it exactly that you do?” ’
    “It makes it easier to find a subject in common,” muttered Jonathan distractedly, taking the dill out of the fridge.
    Megi left the plates and watched him. Jonathan was once more struck how the color of her irises could change from – theoretically warm – brown, to cold, almost graphite.
    “You don’t have any subjects in common.” Her tone was calculated to cut any discussion short. “They have their own EU subjects, which are as finely set apart from normal, universal ones as those of astronauts. You’re to rely on the knowledge I’ve been feeding you over the last few days.”
    “And what if someone tells me they’re the head of the Eastern Partnership task force again? What does it mean? That he goes to the office and what?”
    “Don’t try to understand. Ask about general things.”
    “For example?”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, you used to be a journalist, do I have to tell you how to talk to people?”
    Jonathan held the dill under the tap.
    “My grandfather was a lawyer,” he said, placing the bunch on a